Tell me about the solo guitar gig you're doing with the Los Angeles Free Music Society.
When Medicine reformed a couple of years ago, I finally built a proper pedal board. Since we've sort of stopped actively doing Medicine again, the board itself has evolved into being a solo composition engine, where really pretty much anything can be plugged into it. Multiple things are looping, in various directions and speeds. Hopefully it goes beyond just the "boring-ass guy with a guitar looper" type of thing. It's sort of a texture machine. I got the invitation to do this show and thought, "Here's an excuse to put it to real use." For the first time, maybe the last, I'm going to try to do a live improvisation with it in front of innocent victims. Everyone and their mom has a guitar looper now, but hopefully it'll be more interesting and less transparent than that sounds.
When you are working with loops, do you have a specific process?
For the live purpose there will be loops generated, in the interest of building up layers and doing more than just one guy playing notes. But for studio composing, I use Logic. It lends itself to a modular approach to composition, which hopefully isn't terribly apparent when you listen to it. I think that's kind of a disease of current music, where you can hear where things are Logic or Pro Tools-ed to death. It induces in me a kind of existential dread. I happily use, and exploit, digital technology, but I'm not convinced it's the best thing for music. Being able to fuss over every little thing can be the death of interesting music. I try to fight against that, but I also do love complexity. I look for complexity in the things I listen to, and I've always aspired to it in my own work. I grew up obsessed with Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band's Trout Mask Replica. It's music as complex and organic as a tree, you know? I also grew up loving Yes and Henry Cow. That's the wonderful thing about digital technology. It allows me to build up that kind of complexity by my lonesome, but I'm still not convinced it's as good as anything that's just [thrown] onto a 4-track that you can't fuss with too much. I think about that type of thing all of the time.
On the other hand, being on a budget when you're paying for studio time forces you to make decisions quickly because your time is limited.
Right. With the old Medicine records, which I had a decent budget for, I was in a constant state of panic. It was my first time really working in a 24-track studio. It wasn't pleasant, but now, when I listen back to those records, I still agree with most of the production decisions I had to make on the fly. I had plotted out what was going to go on each track in advance, which of course you don't have to do anymore.
Tell me more about that.
[I used] standard 24-track[ing] sheets because you had a finite amount of space. I didn't yet have the technical smarts to cleverly expand upon that limitation. We talked at times about chaining two 24-track machines together, but we never actually did it. The place we worked at, Hammer Sound Recorders, in Chatsworth, California, was relatively affordable. It isn't operational anymore, unfortunately. It was in a little industrial park, next door to a bigger studio called Cornerstone Recording, where we also did a little bit of mixing. Hammer Sound was this great, grungy, get-in-there-and-work-your-ass-off kind of place, helmed by a wonderful and very open-minded engineer, Chris Apthorp. I spent a couple years in there doing the early Medicine records before the home recording technology really got good. Then I got into ADATs for a while. I had three ADATs chained together, as well as a Mackie 32 x 8 board. That was my jam for a while, before falling into the computer.
An engineer I work with uses two 16-track ADATs for his mobile rig.
Those were really great to chain together. Those really communicated nicely. You could have the one remote control three of them, and they'd catch up with each other. That was a huge change. The records I did for Island Records, under the name Amnesia, were all done with that ADAT set up.
Were those solo?
Yeah, mostly solo. I'm not crazy about them, to be honest. I'm perfectly happy to have those be completely obscure; but, strangely enough, it was the biggest money record deal I ever got. I bought a house on that deal, just on the cred I had built up from Medicine, perversely enough. I definitely had no business doing those records, artistically or commercially. But it was an opportunity I was obliged to try to make the most of.
How many did you do?
Two. Well, there are two Amnesia records, and one Electric Company record [Studio City], which I do like, even though it's amazingly primitive. It's hilarious to hear now. Those were all done with the ADATs. That's around when I discovered the [Akai] MPC 3000. My friend, Chris Pitman, who is now a member of Guns N' Roses, and with whom I did the Lusk record [Free Mars] with in 1997, taught me about printing a track of SMPTE [time] code in order to sync various devices. I'd print a track of SMPTE (which the MPC could generate) for the duration of the song, and then feed the SMPTE code into my MPC so I could overdub, and each overdub could at least start and stop at precisely the same time. That's the story of that record. It's SMPTE code feeding the MPC, and then 24 tracks of madness that have been sync'd to SMPTE code.
Is it a pretty time-consuming process?
Oh, yeah; it was ridiculous. You can imagine I was very happy to dive into the computer, once it became a viable thing.
What is your relationship with the Hometapes label? How did that start?
I met them on the Internet. Hometapes is a married couple; Adam and Sara Heathcott. They started the label shortly after I met them, via a dicey pre-bit torrent file sharing network called Hotline in the early aughts. Good times. They're visual artists, first and foremost. I had made my first solo album and offered it to them. Their mission was to glorify the records they released with incredible packaging, which they did to great effect with all three that I made for them. It was 100 percent a labor of love art project. Not a commercial enterprise at all; just a 'go for broke and spend too much money making it beautiful' venture, which is fine because all three of them were recorded right here in my house and I didn't charge myself much.
The packaging element of it is great. It encourages people to consider purchasing the hard copy, since you won't get all of the artwork with the digital download.
Oh, yeah. They're absolutely beautiful visual objects, meant to be tactile and pleasant to hold in your hands. Those three records are super important to me. It's truly post-Medicine, finally. It's just me doing whatever I want, without any worry about fitting into any genre. Those records are like the truest expression of me, as a musician or as an artist, without any concern for anything whatsoever, other than just doing what excites me. I don't expect anybody to pay attention to them. I don't expect any sort of glory from it, at all. I just look at those and think, "Look what I got to do." I feel like those are my mature works, in a way. They started when I was 40. Basically those three records are my 40s. I'm going to be 50 this year. The first one, Neighbor Singing, is almost like my easy-listening record in a way, where I felt like it was finally okay for me to not go totally nuts and maintain that feel for an entire album. Since my signature seems to be noise, and there's precious little noise on that record, it was fun to escape that.
Are you playing mallets on the Electric Company record, 62-56? You can really hear the attack on what sounds like a xylophone.
No, that's very much early Logic usage, where I was starting to actually make music rather than producing work, despite limitations in my knowledge of the technology. I always say that Electric Company was myself learning new music technology in public. By the time I got to 62-56 and the record I did for Planet Mu called Slow Food, it wasn't as much about learning the technology as it was finally flowing and making music with the skills I had accrued. I like 62-56 too, because of the long ending piece where I was dragging these IDM [Intelligent Dance Music] kids into the realm of free improvisation. They weren't terribly comfortable with it, but I think that's what makes it interesting to hear.
They were improvising on their laptops?
Yes, five people with their own laptop-based setups, as one did circa 2000.
How did you record that?
A stereo mix into Logic. Everybody had a channel into my Mackie. This was when I had the board.
So was it sort of like live mixing, in a way?
Yeah. It was jazz style. We got what we got. It was a stereo mix at the end. It was a good experience. I was ten years older than any of them. That's the other thing about Electric Company, the other story of Electric Company. Me taking advantage of my position as the notable guitar guy from Medicine, and finding talented electronic music kids who were willing to teach me their secrets. I didn't know anything at all about making electronic music after Medicine ended, so I started hanging around with people like Kid606 and another kid named Alex Graham, who did wonderful records under the name Lexaunculpt, and with whom I later did the Internal Tulips record on Planet Mu. These were true whiz kids who knew how to program intricate, tricky beats and do all of the other arcane digital magic that I desperately needed to learn. This was around 1999-2000.
Were you doing loops with Medicine or with Savage Republic? Because on some of the credits under your name on those records it says, "Tape." What would that be?
In the '80s I used to do a live performance thing with my 4-track recorder. I would have a few 20 or 30 second loop cassettes, and I would have four individual tracks of loops on each of them. So when Debt of Nature would play live, that would be my main instrument. You can see there's a built-in mixer on those lovely old 4-track machines, so I could pan, cross-fade, and so on. [It was] sort of a primitive sampler. So when I'm credited with "tapes" on Savage Republic records, generally I was mixing some of my loop cassettes. It was one of my main axes, at the time.
I wanted to ask you about the Brian Eno [Tape Op #85] album, Another Day On Earth, that you contributed to.
It's a footnote, but it's a significant footnote.
How many tunes on that album are you on?
Just one.
How did that come about? Did you work remotely?
Yes. I didn't really work at all, to be perfectly honest. Around 2000 Brian Eno took a strong interest in Kid606 and the Tigerbeat6 label, which was then releasing my work as Electric Company. He met with Miguel De Pedro (Kid606) in San Francisco, and Miguel handed him a pile of CDs. A couple months later I get an email from Brian Eno and he wrote, "Hey, I got these CDs from Miguel, and I took a big sample out of this one piece. Is this you?" I wrote back, "Er, yes!" He said, "Listen to this track. I made this new piece out of your piece of music. Can I use this? How do we do this?" I said, "I don't want to license the track to you. I want you to say I played on it, and I want you to give me an Eno-esque credit." So there's this piece that's built on an Electric Company piece on that otherwise very wonderful record. It's called "Going Unconscious." I'm credited with "pulse loop," which is a very nice, properly Eno-esque credit. My favorite thing about this story is that I got the initial email from him the same day we did the ultrasound for my then pregnant wife, and we found out we were having a healthy boy human. It was like Christmas. I still, to this day, want to be Eno when I grow up.
